Yozh Robot

Yozh robot

Yozh is a small (under 10cm*10cm) robot, based on Pololu’s Zumo chassis. It was created by shurik179 for a robotics class at SigmaCamp. Below are the key features of this robot.

The robot consists of the following components:

  • Zumo chassis by Pololu

  • Power source: 4 AA batteries (NiMH rechargeable batteries recommended)

  • Two micro metal gearmotors by Pololu (6V, HP, 75 gear ratio), with motor encoders

  • Custom electronics board, containing a slave MCU (SAMD21) preprogrammed with firmware, which takes care of all low-level operations such as counting encoder pulses, controlling the motors using closed-loop PID algorithm to maintain constant speed, and more

  • ItsyBitsy RP2040 by Adafruit, which serves as robot brain. It plugs into the main board and is programmed by the user in CircuitPython, using a provided CircuitPython library to communicate with the slave MCU over I2C. This library provides high-level commands such as move forward by 30cm

  • Included sensors and electronics:

    • Top plate with 128*64 OLED display and 2 buttons for user interaction

    • Bottom-facing reflectance array with 8 sensors, for line-following and other similar tasks

    • Two front-facing distance sensors, using VL53L0X laser time-of-flight sensors, for obstacle avoidance

    • A 6 DOF Inertial Motion Unit (IMU), which can be used for determining robot orientation in space for precise navigation

    • Two RGB LEDs for light indication and a buzzer for sound signals

    • Two ports for connecting servos

  • There are plenty of pins available for connection additional electronics. We also provide several standard connectors for users convenience (Qwiic/Stemma QT connector for I2C devices, Grove connectors)

  • Yozh is compatible with mechanical attachments (grabber, forklift,…) by DFRobot.

All robot design is open source, available in github repository under MIT License, free for use by anyone. We also plan to create a Yozh kit which would be sold on Tindie for those who want to build the robot but do not have time or skill to assemble their own PCBs.

You can view photos and videos of Yozh here:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ERGFzz6CUv6od8WP6

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